A girl passionate about building robots with a twitter handle @RobotGrrl. Host of the popular Robot Party on google+, Erin speaks, so does her Robotbirrd!

Via:[Adafruit]

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to be part of OH/DC: Open Source Hardware Comes to DC, organized by Public Knowledge. This public event is bringing practitioners and experts to Washington D.C. to explain what open-source hardware is, how it’s being used, and how it can work as a business. If you’re in the area, please stop by the Rayburn House Office Building from 1 to 5 pm and check it out!

Here are some highlights from the schedule:

1:25-2:40 – Panel 1: What is Open Source Hardware? (Rayburn House Office Building Room 2322)

• David A. Mellis, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab; Co-Founder Arduino
• Catarina Mota, Co-chair, Open Hardware Summit
• AnnMarie Thomas, Assistant Professor, University of St. Thomas; co-creator, Squishy Circuits
• Moderated by Alicia Gibb, President, Open Source Hardware Association

2:40-3:30 – Panel 2: Open Source Hardware for Fun and Profit (Rayburn House Office Building Room 2322)

• Ayah Bdeir, Founder, littleBits; TED Fellow
• Leah Buechley, Assistant Professor, MIT Media Lab; creator, LilyPad Arduino
• Andrew “bunnie” Huang, owner bunniestudios LLC
• Nathan Seidle, CEO, SparkFun Electronics
• Moderated by Michael Weinberg, Senior Staff Attorney and Innovation Evangelist, Public Knowledge

3:30-5:00 – Hands-on Demonstration: Experience Open Source Hardware First Hand (Rayburn Foyer)

I hope to meet some of you tomorrow at OH/DC!

During the last year we have seen our community growing at a tremendous pace. This has its pros and cons. More people means more people to help out, but also more work in moderating the forum. We want to be inclusive at we work of supporting multi-language forum topics, as well as the multi-language IDE. The way this is done is through delegation and we have been welcoming new moderators recently who, by the way, are making a terrific job and are pushing the team in improving the Database’s response times with very creative solutions.

On top of that, we are opening the blog to guest bloggers. Davide Gomba, head of Officine Arduino Torino, is going to be coordinating the group of bloggers that will be posting contents to the Arduino Official site.

When it comes to the Spanish community, we have been looking at the work made by Arduteka (arduteka.com) in Zaragoza, Spain. They have been running a forum for some time and are very engaged in reaching people speaking Spanish from all around the world. Therefore we have decided to invite Pablo and his partner Carlos to become both moderators in our Forum and guest bloggers to write about projects made with Arduino as well as tutorials in Spanish and reviews of different Arduino-related products.

In this way we are not just enlarging our group of moderators, but bringing people with opinions and a strong interest in getting things done the right way. As Pablo and Carlos cannot be attending two forums at once, we will do our best to import the most informative of the messages in their current forum to also help their current user base feel more comfortable with the migration.

Here a quote from Arduteka’s announcement taken from their website (in Spanish):

Cuando llevábamos apenas dos meses, nos pedisteis la incorporación de un foro en que pudiéramos “conocernos” plantear proyectos, quedadas, dudas y demás…

De nuevo tuvo gran éxito entre vosotros incrementando aún más el flujo de visitas (hasta el punto que nuestro servidor esta cuasi saturado) y generando gran unión entre la comunidad, con una gran comunicación, llegando a diferentes países de habla hispana como España, Venezuela, México o Colombia

Pues bien amigos, todo este trabajo y esfuerzo no ha caído en saco roto para el equipo oficial de Arduino y a partir de ahora colaboraremos activamente en la difusión y organización de contenido en castellano en Arduino.cc!

El primer paso, será la unión de este foro con el oficial de Arduino.cc de manera que juntemos esfuerzos en la unión y difusión de la comunidad de habla hispana, uniremos experiencias y daremos forma al foro entre el moderador actual Coleoptero y yo.

Per il secondo anno Discienza organizza l’Arduino Day, un giorno di incontri e scambio su progetti, pratiche, e smanettamenti vari fatti con Arduino. Alle 17:00 il nostro speech mostrerà alcuni prodotti e progetti su cui Arduino sta lavorando.

Arduino Day 2012 è una giornata dedicata a Arduino e alla community dei suoi utilizzatori, un evento in cui verranno presentate le novità
2012 più importanti del settore, e dove un grande open space raccoglierà i migliori progetti di appassionati e professionisti.
Nella sezione dedicata alle scuole e alla didattica sarà possibile richiedere informazioni per l’attivazione di corsi di formazione su Arduino.
La mattina sarà aperta con una conferenza dedicata a studenti e docenti per discutere insieme dei progetti di didattica della robotica e stimolare un confronto attivo.
Per tutta la giornata sarà attivo uno spazio aperto con esposizione libera di una selezione di progetti di istituti e appassionati e nel contempo sarà
possibile assistere ad una serie di Mini, brevi speech di circa 15 minuti in cui verranno presentati alcuni progetti Arduino based

prenota e partecipa, e porta a vedere il tuo progetto!

Open-source hardware has seen a number of exciting development over the past few years: the open hardware summit, the open-source hardware definition, an open-source hardware logo, and, of course, lots of great new open-source hardware products. Many of the people behind these efforts have been working together to establish an lasting framework for the promotion of open-source hardware and the coordination of these kinds of community initiatives. I’m very happy to share the news that this initiative has found a home in the newly-announced Open-Source Hardware Association (OSHWA).

The founding board consists of Alicia Gibb, co-founder of the Open Hardware Summit and former employee of Bug Labs; Nathan Seidle, founder and CEO of SparkFun Electronics; Windell Oskay, co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories; Danese Cooper, a long-time advocate of open-source; Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer and expert in free software and free speech; and Catarina Mota, PhD researcher and co-organizer of this year’s Open Hardware Summit.

The association was set up and the initial board members selected by a working group which also included myself, Tom Igoe, and Massimo Banzi (of Arduino); Ayah Bdeir, co-founder of the Open Hardware Summit, founder of littlebits, and instigator of many of the above community initiatives; and many others (listed in the OSHWA FAQ). These folks have been much of the driving force behind the open-source hardware summit, definition, and logo and I’m thrilled to see the energy from these efforts being translated into a more lasting form. Additional board members will be elected soon, from public nominations.

This is a very exciting time for open-source hardware and I think the establishment of the association is an important step in maintaing and developing a vibrant open-source hardware community.

Read more about the Open-Source Hardware Association here.

I’ve been helping Catarina Mota and others put together this open-source hardware survey. It’s an attempt to better understand who we are as a community and how/why we develop and use open-source hardware. We’d love to hear about your experiences with open-source hardware!

The survey will be up until April 15, and the aggregate results will be made publicly available in the form of a report consisting of graphics, percentages, and anonymized quotes. By publishing your (anonymous) responses, we hope to provide the public with insights into the practices and experiences of the people involved in open-source hardware.

Fill out the survey here.